Two Minute Warning ★★★½
THE 1976 thriller Two Minute Warning will never be remade in its original form.
I can state that with confidence for two reasons.
Firstly, the straight-forward manner in which it presents a mass killing by sniper just can’t work today.
Sniper sequences do happen in modern movies – one of the Reacher movies, I think the second, is an example – but the actual killings are never the entire story.
Mass killings are just too frequent in real life to be seen as widely acceptable action or even violent entertainment like John Wick.
The second reason it won’t be remade in its original form is that it’s already been done by the same studio and failed.
Two Minute Warning was strangely, originally promoted as another film in the run of ‘70s and ‘80s so-called disaster films that started with Airport and included the likes of The Poseidon Adventure, Earthquake, The Towering Inferno and Rollercoaster.
The films had big star casts and were highly popular for a decade or so.
I recall Two Minute Warning not being in the same league and garnering some criticism for its subject matter and the treatment, albeit nothing like the level it would receive now.
When the film was getting ready for free broadcasting on television the studio became nervous and decided to recut the film.
Some of the sniper narratives was removed and replaced with new scenes that gave the killings some semblance of reason, in that case cover for a robbery.
In its original form, Two Minute Warning is an interesting time capsule of a film featuring a lone sniper shooting fans attending a major football match.
Charlton Heston plays the main detective in an inspired piece of casting in retrospect due to his long-time advocacy of the right to bare arms as head of the US Rifleman’s Association.
The great John Cassavetes plays a SWAT team commander and Martin Balsam the stadium boss, while Walter Pidgeon, Beau Bridges, Jack Klugman, Gena Rowlands and David Janssen lead the supporting cast playing fans in the sniper’s sights.
The film is well made and particularly effective in its final act when the sniper’s actions cause a human stampede that threatens to result in even more deaths.
The final confrontation with the killer is highly effective but troubling, hence the TV version and Two Minute Warning’s general fall from grace and attention in film history.